The ministry’s press service told AFP the man “was detained in Iran in early January”.

“The embassy in Tehran is in contact with local authorities. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is in contact with relatives in Sweden,” it said in an email.

The man resided in central Sweden, according to the foreign ministry, which added that it could not give any more details, citing “consular confidentiality”.

According to broadcaster TV4, the man was sought under an international warrant on suspicions of “accessory to murder” and weapons offences in Sweden in relation to a deadly shooting last summer.

The VLT newspaper reported that a district court in Vasterås, a city about 100 kilometres west of Stockholm, had ordered the man remanded in custody in absentia in late December.

The foreign ministry declined to comment immediately on the reports when contacted by AFP.

On December 19th, a Swedish appeals court confirmed a life sentence for the former Iranian prison official, Hamid Noury.

Noury, 62, was convicted of “grave breaches of international humanitarian law and murder” over his role in a purge that saw at least 5,000 prisoners killed during a 1988 purge of dissidents in Iran.

The next day, Iran summoned Sweden’s charge d’affaires to protest the sentence.

Earlier in December, Swedish EU diplomat Johan Floderus went on trial in Iran on charges of conspiring with Iran’s arch-enemy Israel.

Floderus, 33, was arrested on April 17th, 2022, at Tehran airport as he was returning to Iran from a trip with friends.

His arrest came while Noury was being tried in Sweden which led to a life sentence handed down in July 2022, which was then appealed.

Iran has previously used detained foreigners as bargaining chips to secure the release of its citizens abroad, and Swedish media reports have also speculated about the possibility of a prisoner swap.

In May 2023, the Iranian-Swedish dissident Habib Chaab was executed following a conviction of “corruption on earth”.

Academic Ahmadreza Djalali, another Iranian-Swede, was arrested in Iran in 2016 and sentenced to death on espionage charges. He remains under threat of execution.